Everything I Wish I'd Said
by I Took the One Less Travelled
Summary: When she is first torn from him, she thinks that it's a dream. Rose Tyler, from Doomsday to Journey's End. Canon Compliant, and therefore angsty. Ten/Rose, Ten II/Rose


When she's first ripped from him, she thinks that it's a dream. She bangs on the button and nothing happens, she hurls her body against the wall, and still nothing happens, and she's sure that it's a horrible nightmare, that any minute now she will wake up in her bed on the TARDIS and she will find him and he will hold her.

Days and days past, and she still doesn't wake. Months, and she hears nothing from him—as if he were a dream himself. Sometimes, when she squints, she can pretend that this has always been her life, that mansions filled with everything that she could ever want and are somehow more empty than her flat with her mum on the Powell Estates ever were have always been reality, and life as a shopgirl where a man with big ears and a Northern accent told her to run and changed her entire world is the true dream.

She discards dream and reality for work—Torchwood is miserable, but it's something to do, something that sometimes shuts her brain up for whole minutes at the time where she doesn't feel her heart ripping itself apart over the Doctor. She feels guilty for wanting to forget, but she knows that he wouldn't want her to hurt.

Then, when she had given up on ever hearing it again, six months after he's gone from her forever, she hears his voice in her sleep. Of course she follows it, and for two glorious minutes, she's whole again.

She tells him. She was never going to tell him, she was always going to deny it, but this—she needs him to know. And he almost says it back. Almost. She's sure that he _is_ going to say it—she has to be sure. It's the only way to keep herself sane.

After all, the man that never says goodbye, and he's burned up an entire sun just to say it to her. That must mean something, right?

She decides right then and there that two minutes isn't enough. She wouldn't be Rose Tyler if she took that lying down. She hurls herself into her studies—her mum had tried to talk her into going back to school, into getting her A-levels and getting into university. They have the money now, and the time. She hadn't before—she's spent the last six months not doing much of anything but offering alien expertise to Torchwood. But now, she goes back.

She starts at the beginning. Physics reminds her of him, so she goes into physics and finds that it's much easier to understand. That he taught her more than she ever realized, while he was babbling a one hundred miles an hour. Through it all, she stays with Torchwood. She stops alien invasions, and runs for her life and almost dies.

She finds a time agent wandering around, one who discovered that they stole two years worth of memories from him, and she teaches him how to live without being a con man. Jack Harkness has the ability to make her smile in any universe, even one without the Doctor.

They start reconstructing the dimension jumper. They fix the designs, based on the innards of Jack's vortex manipulator and their previous technology. It travels in time, but it cannot hope dimensions, not at first.

But then finding the Doctor becomes much more urgent, because the dimension cannon starts working and the stars start disappearing and nobody but her, Jack and Mickey can remember them being there at all. Because they're time travellers, Jack explains, and they have a different perception of things.

She assures them that the stars really were there, and they believe her. They help her construct the cannon, help her try to contact the Doctor, and she begins a gruelling search for her Doctor. She finds herself on planets one hundred thousand years in the future, she finds herself dealing with angry mobs and monsters. She misses the Doctor by seconds, she finds herself discovering. She finds herself in worlds where she never existed, worlds where Rose Tyler is a tween pop sensation (she didn't even know that she could _sing_), and she ends up mobbed by fans who mistake her for their idol before she finally escapes into a dark enough corner that she can jump to another world, a different one.

Then she finally finds her world—or what is supposed to be her world, anyway. It clearly isn't—it can't be. He _cannot_ have died. It just feels _wrong_. The dimension cannon can measure timelines, and it assures her that this is her universe. Sort of. The way the timelines are twisted and bent is clearly not normal—this was not supposed to happen this way.

But, even seeing her Doctor on a stretcher, she feels hope. She knows that it can be fixed. And she's the only one left to fix it.

It's pure luck that leads her to encountering Donna Noble. The Cannon measures her timeline, and Rose finds that the reason that the timelines in this awful, awful world are so bent and twisted is because they are bent and twisted around _her_. Donna Noble is the key. Now all Rose needs to do is convince her that she is fantastic, as her first Doctor would have said.

They fix the timelines, and Rose finds that the world is much better off. Jack isn't taken captive by a Sontaran ship, his team aren't dead, and the Doctor isn't either. But now she's back to her original problem—how to make him hold still long enough for her to find him.

Then the earth is gone. The Daleks have taken it, and Rose doesn't have a Time Vortex lying around to vaporize them with this time. But there's her Doctor, and he'll fix it. He always does. Donna Noble is with him. She doesn't remember that world, not really, but she knows Rose when she sees her, and she points her out to the Doctor, who turns towards her with the universe in his eyes.

When she thinks that he's regenerating, all of the things that she hasn't said to him race through her head. It broke her heart when it happened to her first Doctor, but the second one loved her just as much. Who's to say that the next one will? She's been gone from him from two years, maybe his feelings will have changed.

But hope returns when he redirects the regeneration energy; when he's still _him_. She still doesn't have time to say all the things that she hasn't, but there will be time later. Yes, the world is ending, and it looks utterly hopeless, but he still takes her hand as they leave the TARDIS, and there's nothing in the world like the way that their fingers feel when they lock together.

Martha Jones must have travelled with him too, and the look on her face when Rose says her name suggests that the Doctor mentioned her. He never mentioned anyone—even after she had _met_ Sarah Jane, she had had to wrestle stories from him. But Martha gasps, and looks amazed and beautiful and like she was witnessing a miracle.

"He found you," she says.

Which suggested that he'd been looking. For her. Like she was looking for him.

The battle is over eventually, and she wonders how Jack can have woken up from dying like that, but she doesn't have time to ask now. There are two Doctors, and they're all in the TARDIS, towing the earth home.

Then he lands on the beach in the parallel universe. The beach that haunts her nightmares, the worst day of her life, ever, and he cannot say it. But his twin, his clone, _he_ says it, and he clings to her hand as the only true home that either of them have ever known fades from their lives for the last time, and she realizes why. Realizes what a gift that he has given her.

This clone, the Doctor is trusting _her_ fix him. The way that she fixed her first Doctor, so full of rage and guilt and pain. He could have left him anywhere, with any_one_, and he left him with her. A human Doctor, a man that can grow old with her. Her Doctor (for he truly is her Doctor, now) clings to her hand with one of his, and the piece of TARDIS coral that Donna gave them with the other, and she realizes that she has an entire lifetime to say all the things that she wishes she'd said.

She turns to him, to her Doctor. "I love you," she starts with—the first words of their own personal version of eternity.


End file.
